Recommended only if you're joyfully nostalgic for it. Otherwise there are much better point and click games from Humongous Entertainment out there.

Pajama Sam and Spy Fox have an all ages, Pixar kind of appeal to them whereas the Putt Putt games are clearly made for young children.

DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR CHILDHOOD
WAS IT AMAZING
THIS GAME WILL MAKE YOUR CURRENT CHILDHOOD GOOD
PROMISE

All the 5 year-olds should play this instead of all the first person shooters I love to play.

The series is meant for kids, and I'm not a kid anymore, but I had fun playing this one. I played some of the series when I was little, and I bought the Humongous pack when it first came out. I'll get to all of them eventually.

Putt-Putt Enters the Race was the one that took me the longest to finish so far at 80 minutes - there are definitely more puzzles here than in the earlier games, like Joins the Parade and Goes to the Moon. The animations are cute.

Recommended for: nostalgic twenty-somethings and little kids.

My kid loves to see his daddy click everywhere to see the funny animations. Best game ever & perfect for the target age of approximately small child still wearing diapers.

As for adults, well... Let's just say the game is so incredibly easy that I felt tainted forever by shame after realizing that I could have gone through that tunnel since the beginning if I'd simply pressed the horn... Well, what? I'm so used to implicit walls that open by themselves when you've completed a chapter, y'know? Who are you to judge me anyway? Raising kids is a lot of work!

This game is AMAZING. I must have played for 90 hours. I don't even know where to began. The plot is pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ deep. Putt putt lives in nazi-occupied Warsaw. He works underground to try to encite rebellion among the simple-minded citizens who follow the government without question. Putt putt decides to join a race to earn followers to his cause. You have to avoid pedofiles, Benito Meusilini, and cannaballistic prisoners of a Soviet Gulag. This is all done using the metaphor of mentally ill cars who know nothing about the horrors of the world.

YES/10

CHILDHOOD.

Synopsis

A sentient automobile known as Put-Put prepares for a race with the help of his trusty canine companion in this point-and-click adventure.

The Good

Most importantly, the pointing and clicking controls are spot-on. I was truly impressed by the way the cursor changes to elucidate the direction in which Put-Put will go if one were to hover over a given path. Point-and-click franchise contenders such as Diablo have yet to implement a feature like this. Further, Put-Put's telekinetic power is a great complement to this control system wherein he can manipulate almost any part of any scene by summoning wild animals with seeming druidic magicks. Note, however, that there is another disturbing way in which Put-Put and other automobiles manipulate the environment as discussed later under The Absurd.

As for the graphics, the anti-aliasing and static shadows are on par with that of any Bethesda title. Also, the gritty, high-contrast delivery, while not cell-shaded, offers up Put-Put Enters the Race as a starkly obvious precursor to the Borderlands style of not trying, but making stuff look cool through the overuse of persistent Photoshop-esque filters. All in all, my best guess is that the graphic artists behind this game went on to work for and inspire many AAA game companies.

In a similar line of thought, the narrative is ambiguously revealing of Put-Put's inner quest. To the point, much of Put-Put's world is implied rather than directly told to the player, hence the lack of cutscenes. Thus, Put-Put Enters the Race is clearly the spiritual predecessor to Demon's Souls, which eventually led to Dark Souls, and later to Bloodborne. There is no doubt to me that From Software reverse engineered the storytelling acumen of this game to go on to create the greatest non-stories in video games of all time, minimalism at its best.

The Bad

Unfortunately, the lack of musicianship in the game detracts from the immersion big time, especially considering the use of the many royalty-free sound effects. As any professional gamer knows, the audio is what ties a game together at the end of the day. The developers could have taken a hint from Nintendo here, who, just through leveraging MIDI music, mind-controlled several generations of Americans. What young adult hasn't dreamed in the Mario or Pokemon theme? But, rather than getting too upset about this, I elected to replace the default music and sound effects with that of Tyler the Creator, whose style happened to somehow perfectly mesh with this game.

And, no DualShock support? What's with that?

The Absurd

For whatever reason, all of the automobiles have tentacles that emerge from their undercarriage. What's more, Redline Rick is ... how do I put this? He's "grabby" around Put-Put.... Take that for what you will. Piling up in the bizarre category, high-octane gasoline is free and available at any gas station. Put-Put seems compulsive and frantic about this stuff, uncontrollably shaking after consumption. When I noticed that Put-Put stores his canine companion in his glove compartment, along with batteries and a ladder, I realized what was really going on.

Put-Put is a hallucinatory addict, and most of what he experiences is probably not real due to his overconsumption of high-octane gasoline. This implication is strongly hinted when Put-Put begins finding empty bottles everywhere that he wishes to take a recycling center. The bottles represent his unspoken habit, and the recycling center represents his yearning to break free from his wrongdoings. Ultimately, upon proper reflection, the absurdity of the game is revealed as a masquerade for a deep life lesson otherwise kept away from children. Ultimately, the developers of Put-Put Enters the Race introduce the harsh realities of life to youth by subverting first-glance parental supervision in the same vein as SpongeBob SquarePants.

8/10

This is quite possibly the best game ever made

Amazing game, absolutely spectacular. Possibly one of the best games to ever be created, probably ever. No game is more nostalgic, thought out, and executed than Putt-Putt Enters the Race. One of, if not the best Putt-Putt game to date by a mile. I am not entirely sure how this game did not win Game of the Year, every year, forever. Hats off to the developers for their dedication and passion with the Putt-Putt franchise. For many more years of Putt-Putt to come, goodnight.